When Bob is the lead protagonist of a work, his presence is essential to the plot. Accordingly, the rules of the world seem to bend around him. The very fact that he's the main character protects him from death, serious wounds, and generally all lasting harm (until the plot calls for it). Even psychological damage can be held at bay by Bob's suit of Plot Armor.

Sometimes referred to as "Script Immunity" or a "Character Shield", Plot Armor is when a main character's life and health are safeguarded by the fact that he's the one person who can't be removed from the story. Therefore, whenever Bob is in a situation where he could be killed (or at the least very seriously injured), he comes out unharmed with no logical, In-Universe explanation.note a typical explanation is that Bob survived through sheer luck, but nevertheless, if ninety-nine times out of one-hundred the character would have died, then it's not a very good reason.

Bear in mind that having Plot Armor is not the same as being Nigh Invulnerable. When Superman takes a bullet to the eye and survives, that's his superhuman nature — there's an explanation, albeit a fantastic one, for how he comes out unharmed. When Indiana Jones survives the same thing, that's Plot Armor — the only explanation for his survival is that it's only halfway through the movie and you know he can't die yet. (Bonus points if he isn't even blinded.)

The downside to all this, of course, is that when it isBob's time to die, nothing can save him. And his inability to heal or escape death may seem just as illogical as his ability to avoid it was forty minutes ago. The plot gods giveth and the plot gods taketh away...

Hitler's Time-Travel Exemption Act: Hitler has unbreakable Plot Armor, to the point where no timey-wimey attempt to assassinate him will succeed, or if succeeds, it will make things even worse. (Don't ask which God of Evil gave that to him)

Lowered Monster Difficulty: The villain's Plot Armor degrades over time, and/or the hero(es)'(s) becomes more prominent against them)

Iron Butt Monkey: A character repeatedly survive from various improbable tortures just to be laughed at because he or she is a Butt Monkey.

Saved by Canon: A character that appears in a prequel, can't die since he/she appears in the original.

Compare Contractual Immortality (a meta trope where a character cannot truly be dead since his or her actor hasn't left the show) and Rule of Empathy (which may give Plot Armor to sympathetic non-protagonist characters, including villains).

For examples where important characters are just magnitudes stronger than the poor slobs who can't take even one hit, see Almost Lethal Weapons.

Examples:

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Anime and Manga

Angel Beats!: In episode two Otonashi seems to manage to avoid every trap despite being completely new. Ironically, this is probably the one series where Plot Armor is unnecessary. Because death is very, very cheap.

Done as straight as an arrow for both the four major protagonists and Xellos of Slayers, and the one time that they were thought to have died was a Disney Death. Also, any character that winds up allying with them for an extended period of time also survives, with the only exception being Ozel in Evolution-R. This is averted in the novels when Millina and Luke, Zelgadis and Amelia's replacements, wind up dead (Millina is poisoned and Luke, as a host of Shabranigdo, is killed in battle), but they were more distant in helping Lina and Gourry than Zelgadis and Amelia were.

Bleach is notorious for its characters averting death on a regular basis, to the point where the series is now frequently described with the phrase "Nobody dies in Bleach"... even when the Vandenreich entered the scene they only accomplished a grand total of two named character deaths, one of them off-screen.

Nobody important to the plot dies in Fairy Tail, though recent arcs (Tartaros and Albareth) started to change that. Jellal gets hit by the biggest and baddest spell in the setting and survives without a scratch, all four of the main characters go through at least one near-death experience per arc and survive (Lucy did really die once, but it was her future self saving her present self from death), and even Lisana who dies before the story starts, ends up in Edolas rather than Heaven. People and attacks that have defeated countless people till then can´t even put the protagonists unconscious. And again at the end of the Tenrou Island arc, all of us thought the main characters died after getting blasted by Acnologia's attack. Seven years later, and we find out Mavis Vermillion, the first guild master of Fairy Tail, converted them into magic. This gets ridiculous in the Alvarez Empire Arc when they face the power of the Spriggan 12, who are all at least as powerful as the strongest wizard in Ishgar. No matter how powerful their foes are, Fairy Tail manages to survive and emerge victorious, even if it is pretty clear who had the upper hand. Gajeel is pulled to the Underworld and somehow manages to return to the world of the living (him only and not the guy that pulled him), because a wizard used a spell that reshaped Fiore (but only Fiore). Later Mirajane got her heart pierced, which should have killed anyone in seconds, and yet lives long enough to have her wound treated. Then Juvia attempts to commit suicide and even transfuses her blood into Gray to save his life, only to be revived on the brink of death by Wendy in the very next chapter.

Gauron of Full Metal Panic!, at least until The Second Raid. This guy just will not die. Of course, every time he gets defeated, nobody bothers to look for a body, so that might be the problem.

Nanatsu No Taizai. None of the main characters die as they manage to survive powerful attacks that kill others with ease. The only one that is justifeable is Ban because he drank from the Fountain of Youth, which gave him Complete Immortality. Hawk takes an attack which killed many Holy Knights and dies, but he is ressurected without any explanation and is the only one to come back to life. Later, Galan of the Ten Commandments give a literal Curb-Stomp Battle to the Sins but they are saved because Gowther rewrote his memories for that he think that he had already killed them. Meliodas is truly killed by his brother Estarossa but manages to return from the dead chapters later.

Near the beginning of Ginga Densetsu Weed, the protagonist gets shot. A lot (there were at least 34 bullets in him, according to a later scene). Not only is he back on his feet after a few days, but he is also showing absolutely no signs of being shot over thirty freaking times afterwards. And the protagonist in question is a months old puppy.

Every Gundam series uses it to some extent due to the general During the War/War Is Hell setting, with extremely few main characters ending up as causalities of plot-irrelevant battles regardless of their tactical situation. Some shows completely spare the main cast while others put the lesser heroes through the ringer (and typically only in the last few episodes, at that; if the Plot Armor gets pierced, it almost always happens in the finale). Many a Flame War has been started by someone declaring that one of the series uses Plot Armor beyond Willing Suspension of Disbelief, while either ignoring or forgetting that the show they're currently championing does as well. (Translation: Use the Rule of Cautious Editing Judgment and do NOT post specific examples here.)

One common form of Plot Armor that can be seen throughout the Gundam franchise is that ordinary "grunt" mobile suits tend to mysteriously become a lot more durable than usual if a main character has to temporarily pilot one of them. And the reverse is also true. Whenever a Super Prototype gets put into mass production, even if it explicitly isn't downgraded in the process, the new ones never do as well as the original.

Lampshaded in Medaka Box; the reason the Arc Villain won't start her plans yet is because Medaka is the main character, and thus guaranteed to defeat her if she is challenged. At which point she recruits Medaka's childhood friend Zenkichi to do it for her, and grants him an ability of his own choosing called "Devil Style" which nullifies Zenkichi's own plot armor. First, though, she has to shift the genre of the work to make him the main character in the first place.

Sasuke has a tendency to get into fights that are beyond his ability to win, only to suddenly demonstrate a new power that had never been seen or even hinted at before, or for another villain to bail him out at the last second. And then there's was the time in which Sasuke evaded certain death from an explosion by a combination of two moves that each had immense chakra requirements, despite the reason that he was in danger in the first place being that he had already used up almost all his chakra, and did so in an implausibly short amount of time.

In the final arc of the manga, over forty thousand members of the Shinobi Alliance died, which is half their total forces. Only a handful of them had names, and half of those were mostly introduced just to be killed off. Given just how many characters there are, it's a bit hard to swallow that half the army could have been killed off and hardly any of the major characters were among the casualties. The only confirmed deaths from pre-existing characters were Neji, Shikaku and Inoichi.

In Gaara's fight with Kimimaro, he only survived literally because Kimimaro dropped dead on the spot, and even then he still should have been killed but dying completely robbed Kimimaro's attack of its momentum. For some reason.

Monkey D. Luffy of One Piece sports a rather blatant form of Plot Armor, to the point where it may very well be a plot point. The same goes for the rest of the Straw Hat Crew, especially Zoro. Granted that he had immense strength and durability but sometimes it's kind of unbelievable. For example: When Luffy was exhausted to the point of no longer being able to move and under the danger of being nuked to hell, his severely damaged and barely functioning ship that had been abandoned days prior on another island drifted to his location at that exact moment and his crewmates were able to throw him on and escape. This level of plot armor extends beyond blind luck too; no matter how strong the enemies are, nothing will ever kill one of the Straw Hats. The crew's sharpshooter Usopp, described by Word of God as being supposedly only as strong as a normal person, was able to be smashed by a 4-ton bat and dragged along the ground at 40 miles an hour and live. Truly, the Straw Hats' "limits" are at the complete whim of the plot. They can withstand anything short of being completely obliterated; and any attack capable of doing that will simply not touch them for one reason or another. This unusually thick plot armor is part of the reason why the memetic term "No One Dies in One Piece" was coined.

Parodied in Excel Saga. The first thing that happens is the main character gets hit by a bus, and she is brought back by the Great Will of the Macroism explicitly because she is the main character. Her boss is aware of this, and tends to kill her when she gets too annoying.

The main characters of Saint Seiya fall into this trope (except Phoenix Ikki who can die an revive like the namesake bird). They suffer unaccounted pain and bleed like hell, but still manage to stand up and win no matter what, proving that no matter if you wear a bronze, silver or gold cloth, it's the plot armor that counts.

In Humanity Has Declined, fairies act as plot armor, in that the number of them you meet is tied directly to how safe you are from danger.

In Attack on Titan a few of the main characters sport some blatant Plot Armor that stops them from dying no matter what happens, even in a world where people die like flies, and even if they are not particularly skilled. And even if they die. Eren loses An Arm and a Leg and gets eaten by a Titan in his first battle; but, inevitably, he soon returns, completely unharmed and in a Titan's body, which he uses to massacre numerous other Titans.

The entire premise of Assassination Classroom is about everyone trying to save Earth by figuring out a way to kill Korosensei, the story's Villain Protagonist. He has near god-like speed, regenerative abilities, immunity to poison, and is inhumanly perceptive. Whenever someone apparently drives him into a corner, he always pulls another trick up his sleeve to escape (which he keeps deeply concealed within his plot armor).

The Battle City Finals takes this Up to Eleven, where most characters lose because they have incredible luck, since it's obvious who will meet in the final. Rishid is about to win against Jonouchi, but Malik orders him to summon the copy of The Winged Dragon of Ra, resulting that Ra gets enraged and strikes both players with lightning, and Jonouchi recovers from The Power of Friendship. Mai is not able to use Yami Malik's The Winged Dragon of Ra because she cannot read the Ancient Egyptian incantation text on the card, and Yami Malik uses Ra instead. Kaiba gets suddenly a vision that basically tells him that he should use his Blue-Eyes White Dragon instead of Obelisk the Tormentor, sacrificing his Egyptian God Card, which makes Isis' Trap Card useless. And then in the semi-finals, Jonouchi nearly defeat Yami Malik, but loses his consciousness because of the torture he had to endure in the duel. And Yami Yugi is able to save himself from losing by suddenly being able to use the effect of Kaiba's The Flute of Summoning Dragon.

In the Doma arc, Yugi sacrifices his soul to save Yami Yugi's, the true main hero of the series.

The heroes always get their Pokemon back from Team Rocket, as does anyone they have befriended that episode (with all of one exception). Yet the organization seems to keep growing through the series, and even the trio were already much-feared criminals before they met Ash and Pikachu. How many trainers must have been less lucky?

Ash Ketchum has survived countless Pikachu electrocutions, the combined might of an attack from both Mew and Mewtwo, a chandelier dropping on him, drowning, countless blunt force trauma incidents, Charizard's flame, freezing cold temperatures, etc etc etc... has the point been made yet?

Because he is relevant to the Team Flare arc and Lysandre does not support trainers who he deems week, Alain is protected by plot armor. When at risk for losing his Mega Bracelet, he and his Mega Charizard X are able to defeat ten Mega Pokemon in a row, including Elite Four Malva's Mega Houndoom. In record timing also, he is able to gain all eight badges, seven episodes after saying he was not competing in the Kalos League. He goes onto defeat Ash in the final round of the league, despite his Mega Charizard X taking numerous hits and surviving an Eleventh Hour Superpower from Ash-Greninja.

Serena, despite her limited progression as a battler and her lateness to discover a goal, has sparsely failed in anything. Her Pokemon have never fainted once in battle due to either her opponents being Team Rocket or being accompanied by a stronger trainer or dumb luck, while the showcases never conveyed her as losing without a serious folly by one of her team, her act always considered the most popular up until the finals.

In Sword Art Online, Kirito survives being beaten to within an inch of his life three times, drawing with Kayaba in what was supposed to be a Duel to the Death, narrowly avoids getting stabbed to death because his enemy was blind in one eye courtesy of their earlier fight, and avoids being poisoned on account of a Pocket Protector stopping the needle, all by the mid-point of the second season.

In Hollow Fields, underachieving students are punished by a weekly elimination system, where the worst student is sent to the Windmill and forced to undergo a Fate Worse Than Death. Lucy Snow, the protagonist, is guaranteed to never endure this fate, even in the beginning where she still hasn't grasped the crafts of Hollow Fields. Even when she is sent to the Windmill, for reasons other than poor academic performance, she still escapes with quick thinking and help from her friends.

This trope is deconstructed in Yuki Yuna Is a Hero. In the first half, the heroes always survive the fights against the Vertexes without a scratch on them, even after falling from heights that should have killed them. If the Vertex actually attacks one of them directly, their faery guardian will just block the attack harmlessly, so they still win without without too much difficulty even when the Vertexes start to avert Conservation of Ninjutsu. In the second half, however, once it's revealed that they aren't recovering from the "temporary" injuries caused by the use of Mankai, Togo attempts suicide ten times, and her faeries stop her without fail, even from things like carbon monoxide poisoning. It turns out that the girls are destined to fight the Vertexes over and over without end, and therefore cannot be killed. Since the use of their powers progressively and inevitably takes their bodily functions away until they're ultimately tetraplegic, that is not a good thing.

Comic Books

During the Decimation event, Plot Armor thoroughly protects the most currently marketable mutant characters from a horrid catastrophe that has depowered and/or caused the deaths of over 10 million others and reduced the population to approximately 198. The few notable characters who were depowered, such as Jubilee, ended up either being repowered or gaining new superhuman abilities to compensate. The D-listers weren't so lucky.

Squirrel Girl, from the Marvel Universe, has beaten every archvillain she has faced, including Doctor Doom, Mandarin, M.O.D.O.K., and Thanos. This is impressive considering her superpower is the ability to communicate with squirrels.

A literal example came when it was announced that X-23 would not only survive the events of the book, but also appear in All-New X-Men. So not surprisingly, the only person absolutely guaranteed to survive the supposed Anyone Can Die story was the one tied to a popular franchise like the X-Men...

An explicit plot point of Contest of Champions. The Collector and the Maestro don't want to bring down the collective wrath of the entire Marvel Universe, so most of the combatants they kidnap for the tournament are obscure heroes who won't be missed. When they do kidnap a well-known hero like Iron Man or Gamora, they only keep them around briefly before wiping their memories and sending them back home.

DC Comics hero The Question had legendary plot armor during the Dennis O'Neil run. In one fight a mook has a gun to the back of Question's head and pulls the trigger. When nothing happens, the mook looks at the gun quizzically and simply says "Misfire?" before Question pummels him. The Question once DID get shot in the head and dumped in the river. The bullet went around the skull, as it was a weak gun. As for the rest, he was rescued by Lady Shiva, who knows all about healing (and killing).

G.I. Joe comics. Scarlett survives a shot to the brainpan in the same manner as The Question. Later, she's stabbed straight through the chest... by Snake-Eyes. No, really. Snake-Eyes, being a ninja, knew the least-worst spot to stab her, as part of a scheme, but still...

Max Allan Collins, who took over Dick Tracy after Chester Gould's retirement, once observed the importance of the Anyone Can Die principle in maintaining credible suspense. Most notably, Junior Tracy's wife was murdered during Collins's tenure as writer. However, he conceded that Tracy himself would never die (though he frequently got badly injured), because he is the main character.

Justified in-universe. Amadeus Cho "did the math" and figured out that the only explanation for no one dying is that Banner/The Hulk must have been consciously preventing the numerous beatings from killing anyone.

Dan Dare, which often lampshaded how frequently its titular star cheated death by pure luck. In Prisoners of Space, this led The Mekon's chief guard to change sides in the mistaken belief that Dan was genuinely immortal.

This is basically The Unbelievable Gwenpool's entire thing. She is a girl from the real world who got plopped down in the Marvel Universe, and she recognizes it as such. She has no superpowers, but she is Genre Savvy. So her plan is basically to put on a costume and act like a Superhero (well, Anti-Hero) that is the star of a story, so that she will gain plot armor. That she knows she can't be killed because she is the star of her own book essentially becomes her superpower.

Fan Fiction

Called Plot Protection in The Legend of Eevee, where it saves the main character, Pichu, from otherwise survivable events such as being stabbed multiple times with a spear or falling into a bottomless pit. Pichu and his partner Togetic both know about it. Some of the secondary characters know about it as well.

In the Mass Effect fanfic The Council Era, when he is in conflict with the Villain Protagonist's son, the Chaotic Evil Takavor Derishama throws his spear and it directly impales him. When he throws the spear at the Villain Protagonist, it goes too far upward, just cutting off one of those muscle-horn things that salarians have.

DC Nation usually requires a player wanting to kill a character to go through an application process of the mods and muns of the characters teammates. The exception is when a mun leaves the game and the character cannot be adopted out for one reason or another.

Lelouch in Soul Chess has an excuse, but apart from that, Word of God states that even Ichigo and his friends will lose theirs after graduation. Some of the other characters from Bleach have lost theirs already. Like Head Captain Yamamoto. Plus Aizen and Yhwach

To clarify, Ichigo is written out of the story (but isn't actually dead) after the Britannian invasion; he shows up again later. Orihime's was baited and switched; she assumes the identity of Inoe from Code Geass, who canonically dies in a mech explosion; Ichigo pulls a Big Damn Heroes to get her out (she doesn't know it's him; he's masquerading as someone else too during the Black Rebellion). Yamamoto is killed by Aizen and Nyra. Lelouch Geasses Aizen into suicide during Rukia's execution; he shows up again as a denizen of hell much later, killing Yamamoto as already stated. Yhwach buys it in the final battle, albeit off panel, against Aizen's latest godmod. For less important canon characters Shinji, Rose, Love, Kensei, Hachi and Hiyori all die, and Lisa nearly joins them. Hisagi, Kira, Sajin, Nanao, Chojiro and Omaeda are all gone too. Some canon deaths, like Tosen, Gin, Starrk, Kaien and Hisana, however, are averted.

In It Gets Worse, Taylor gets this power instead of bug control. And it makes her, in Director Piggot's words, "scarier than any [parahuman] I've encountered yet. And yes, I am including Nilbog in that total." If anyone is about to harm Taylor, something will happen to stop them. And if they were doing it on purpose, they will be punished in proportion to the scale of their deliberate offense. Taylor's power can sense any attempt to harm her, without any conscious effort on her part, and can if necessary reach days or even months back in time to set events in motion.

Film

In The Last Samurai, every single Samurai appears to be killed in the final battle...except for Tom Cruise's character Nate Algren, who miraculously survives being shot multiple times by a Gatling gun.

John Rambo, of the Rambo series, is noted for escaping hails of gunfire relatively unscathed. This is occasionally lampshaded by various parodies.

Going around with as little clothing as possible in Asian jungles isn't the smartest thing in the world to do, either. Disease-ridden mosquitos are quite deadly.

Stormtroopers are supposedly elite soldiers, and Obi-Wan notes that their marksmanship is unusually precise, yet they hit precisely no important characters despite ample opportunities, and when they do, it's typically a minor injury at best. Compare that to how they steamroll over no-name Rebels with ruthless efficiency. In the first movie it's ultimately revealed that they were doing it deliberately to keep the heroes from figuring out they were actually being let go so they could be tracked, although no excuse is offered for the way it continues in the later movies.

Empire also has an explanation as to why the Stormtroopers still can't hit the heroes: In Luke's case they are under order to lure him to Vader, and the escaping rebels are similarly to be brought to him alive.

By means of an odd twist in plot armors - Brenda dies in SM3, her corpse even explodes into pieces. But she reappears in SM4. Lead Character Cindy, who remembers her friend dying one movie ago, even says to Brenda "I thought you were dead!" To which Brenda replies "I thought you were dead!" One look of confusion later and they decide to drop it.

In the first movie Brenda is stabbed to death in a theater for being rude and Cindy is run down by a car at the very end.

In the second movie, Brenda says that she only had a "near death experience", and it turns out Cindy is alive because she was never officially declared dead.

The series that first inspired Scary Movie, Scream, has blatant examples of this with the three protagonists (Sydney, Dewey and Gale), who are always slashed by the antagonists, and even finish the movies in a hospital, but never die.

Big Fish: the father claims to have been shown his own death by a witch, and that it made him fearless, because he knew nothing but that could kill him. Of course, that was 90% lies.

Lampshaded in The Movie of George of the Jungle, the narrator mentions during a recap that "George was really shot but can't die because, let's face it, he's the hero."

G.I. Joe: The Movie. In the original script, good-guy Duke is hit with a snake-spear from Serpentor and dies. However, after Transformers: The Movie traumatized kids with the death of Optimus Prime, Executive Meddling saddled the Joe movie with a hasty edit. Duke's injury merely resulted in a coma, and a voice-over near the end of the movie announced Duke's recovery.

For any villains we may meet, we haven't any fears; Paramount will protect us, 'cause we're signed for five more years.

Every James Bond movie ever made. James is never killed, and rarely seriously hurt, no matter how many bullets fly and explosions go boom, or how many times the villains capture him and have him helpless.

In Peter Jackson's King Kong (2005), there is a scene with Jack Driscoll and a few crew members running in between a pack of Brontosauruses down a narrow path while also avoiding being eaten by velociraptors in full charge. Jack is not only fine, but jump-kicks one of the velociraptors in the face, all while still running UNDER the Brontosauruses.

Der Clown Payday: One of the heroes, wearing a police-grade body armor, holds a Mook in front of him as another Mook shoots him. The Mook in front of him is pierced by more than a dozen high-velocity rounds shot from a machine gun in full auto mode while the hero doesn't even have his shirt damaged.

In Lord of the Rings the main characters have all experienced at least one near death experience and managed to survive or in case of Gandalf he not only came back, he came back stronger (Except Boromir). Aragorn especially has shown this, surviving after falling from a cliff and getting up with no injuries after a explosion occured right beneath his feet, when everybody else near to him died.

This trope is played completely straight and completely serious, as it is literally the superpower of Eli in The Book of Eli, due to him being protected by God Himself. And while it may sound silly, it really, reallyworks.

Played straight, especially the second film, wherein the main characters' ship is attacked by the Kraken, who kills most of the crew except for every single main character who board the lifeboats except for Jack Sparrow, who is left at the ship and then killed by the Kraken as it sinks the boat. He comes Back from the Dead, though.). Even the guy with the talking parrot survived.

In Last of the Mohicans, Alice, Cora, and Major Duncan are the only survivors of two giant massacres.

The eponymous Mystery Team has tremendous luck for the fact that they're inexperienced detectives.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra: The only possible explanation for the Baroness and Storm Shadow to survive their vehicle being hit by a train and catapulted, spinning 30 feet in the air and back down. While their driver dies they hop right out of the wreck and run a good distance.

The protagonist Gerry had survived numerous encounters with the really fast tackling zombies throughout World War Z.

In Godzilla (2014), our hero, Ford Brody, survives no less than four catastrophes, two of which he is the only survivor.

In Guardians of the Galaxy, when Gamora's pod get blown into pieces by a Necrocraft, she doesn't go the way of a Red Shirt. Instead she floats in space, unharmed, slowly freezing to death.note She was shot by her sister Nebula, who both hated her and wanted an item she was holding. She got a 2-for-1 deal! Cue a Big Damn Heroes moment for Quill.

Very unsubtle Plot Armor for main human protagonists was a consistent problem with the live action Transformers Film Series movies. After Sam and Mikaela keep getting thrown into concrete by 20 foot tall metal creatures and suffering nary a scratch, it becomes impossible for viewers to ever believe they're ever in any real danger, killing suspense. Because of this, when Sam was nearly killed in the second movie (he was caught INSIDE a corny explosion and thrown at least ten feet, all without even significantly damaging his clothing) exactly no one was surprised when he survived without any obvious injury.

Literature

One of the many letdowns of the Twilight books is Meyer's continuous promises of danger to characters followed by little to no follow through. In the first book, Laurent refuses to fight against James even though it would be an eight to two fight. Which basically means James must be the badass of badasses. Actually Jasper and Emmett take him out alone. And easily. Book Four is the biggest Plot Armor moment when a brutal battle between the Volturi and the Cullen/Cullen allies that has been worked up for ages devolves into a friendly talk and a okay, let's go home situation. The Twilight characters are supposed to be in real you-could-really-die situations but somehow everyone leaves everything unscathed every single time. (With the exception of Jacob breaking some bones that heal in a day or two.)

When you first read The Lord of the Rings it looks at first like Anyone Can Die: two of the nine (including Gandalf) fall fairly early in their quest. But then Gandalf comes Back from the Dead and the rest survive any number of perils, although not always without injury.

This is made literal in the Xanth novels. In the very first Xanth novel, Bink's magic talent is essentially plot armor, as he cannot be harmed by magic. Unlike many examples, the book is kept interesting because it is a great deal of the point of the plot, and it is not known that this is his talent until quite late in the book, when he exploits it. In the second book, he is specifically chosen for the task of finding the source of magic due to his immunity to harm from it. Despite this, his talent is somewhat picky about what is defined by "harm", and he is still worried that he could be killed by mundane means, as well as by the source of all magic itself, a nearly omnipotent demon. In the end, however, it is implied that his talent is in fact so powerful that even the demon could not overcome it, and that all his seeming misfortune was what saved him in the end. In later books, which become more and more comedy-based, anybody who was one of the stars of a given book has in-universe "major character" status, guaranteeing their safety for at least that one story.

Okra Ogress tries to put Jenny Elf into a life threatening incident, but can't do it simply because Jenny is a major character. Ironically, the reason Okra was trying to get Jenny killed was so that she could get the major character status for herself.

In Foundation and Empire, Toran and Bayta escape Kalgan. After a series of highly improbable escapes, Bayta observes their Plot Armor can only mean they have brought the source of the problems with them.

The later novels in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series feature some lampshaded Plot Armor: Arthur Dent knows he can't die until he visits Stavromula Beta. (Arthur learns this from meeting somebody who wants to kill him because of a long list of things Arthur did, including something that happened there. When he discovers that Arthur hasn't even heard of Stavromula Beta yet, he realises that this means Arthur can't be killed yet without causing a serious time paradox — but he's so angry he tries to kill Arthur anyway.) This leads to a shocking twist at the end of Mostly Harmless, when Arthur unwittingly fulfills the conditions of the accidental prophecy, and is swiftly Killed Off for Real.Probably. To much collective dismay, Authors are not granted the benefits of Plot Armor, and Author Existence Failure has caused a serious disruption in the successful use of Plot Armor.

Subverted in A Song of Ice and Fire, as the perceived main heroes (Ned Stark, Robb Stark) and several characters who were darlings of the readers (Ygritte) pay for their stupid mistakes with death. George R. R. Martin wants to make a point here: his series is a realistic, Anyone Can Die series, and nobody, especially not those who embrace the formulaic role of the Lawful Stupidhero, escapes the consequences of screwing up. Not even the POV characters are protected (at least one, probably two of them are dead by the fifth book). On the other side, some characters who start as secondary characters and little by little gain importance may (or may not) have a form of plot armor against death:

Daenerys Targaryen and Tyrion are generally perceived by fans to be characters who are going to be there for the end game, even though they are not standard adventure heroes by any stretch of the imagination. Note however that 1) they are not protected against damage, pain and suffering, and 2) when they do something "heroic" for love or idealism, the result is usually quite counterproductive, when not downright disastrous. Word of God doesn't agree with fans here. GRRM, during a convention, was asked if Dany had a "plot armor" against death, and replied that she was as likely to die as anyone else.

Arya Stark racks up a virtually countless number of daring escapes unscathed.

The Gaunt's Ghosts books were like this at first with all the main characters; particularly notable was when they killed a Chaos Baneblade in Honour Guard while only losing two or three troopers and one tank. However, as the series has progressed, the central characters have been steadily moving away from Plot Armour. Since the death of Bragg in book 5 and Corbec in book 7, it's been pretty clear that Anyone Can Die. Indeed, less than 10 characters named in the first book remain alive at the end of the twelfth, with another looking likely to go before the end of number 13. Poor, poor Doc Dorden.

Ciaphas Cain is the narrator of his books, which are presented as his memoirs from his time in retirement, so it's kind of a given he'll see the end of each story. Other characters protected by the "memoirs" rationale: Jurgen, Cain's aide-de-camp who stays with Cain his entire documented career; Amberly Vail, Cain's Inquisitorial connection and off-again-on-again lover, who's editing the memoirs; and Jenit Sulla, who we're told very early on will someday become a general (and whose terrible, terrible memoirs often fill in gaps in Cain's narrative). Since this is a much more comedic view of the 40K universe, this isn't a problem; even in the grim darkness of the far future, not knowing if a character will survive to the end would damage their humor value. It's also notable in that the characters themselves notice. Cain in particular is so convinced that all of his successes are due to pure luck that he totally overlooks his own Badass Normal status, and so despite a century of ludicrously one-sided victories thinks of himself as a phoney.

In the X-Wing Series Wedge Antilles, the Mauve Shirt in the movies who became an Ascended Extra, once has a down moment when he thinks about all the friends and companions he's flown with who are now dead, and he imagines them coming between him and what killed them, then wonders when it'll be his turn. He's survived time and again without so much as the excuse of being Force Sensitive - maybe he was Born Lucky, but at a high cost.

He'd beaten the odds for so many years, years in which literally hundreds of pilots he'd known had died in battle around him, as though they were living shields for his X-Wing. Someday his luck would run out and the deadly statistics would catch up to him.

Wedge can actually be considered a nice deconstruction, of a character granted Plot Armor but who considers it more of a curse than a blessing, for the aforementioned reasons.

Rather hilariously, in the final mission of X-Wing Alliance Wedge's X-wing actually is set to invincible, because otherwise the game's AI would never have gotten him through the Death Star reactor alive.

Lampshaded in The Stormlight Archive, where Kaladin's fellow bridgemen notice that arrows have this ever-so-convenient tendency to miss him just barely in situations where they really, really ought not to. The fact that he's unconsciously Surgebinding might have something to do with it.. Somewhat deconstructed in that Kaladin ends up getting depressed about how he keeps surviving situations where others got killed, and thinks he might be literally cursed for a while.

And Invoked for Captain Demoux of Mistborn: The Original Trilogy. He's named after a friend of the author, and the author had to promise that friend that the character named after him would survive to the end and get a Love Interest. This is confirmed by Word of God to be the only thing that kept him alive when he got hit by a nasty curse.

As the Redwall series went on, the mortality rate went from "Anyone Can Die" to "Only vermin are in danger". Perhaps the nadir: One named, nonvillainous character died in Pearls of Lutra, and she had only had five nonsinging lines beforehand.

By Word of God, only one character truly has this in the Honor Harrington series: MacGuiness, Honor's valet, because Weber's wife likes him. In practice, Honor herself ended up with some, though, as she was supposed to be killed off at the end of At All Costs, only for fan outcry (and a change in the series' timeline) to save her. Also, when in one of the later books a massive catastrophe wipes out the entirety of a city where one of Honor's relatives is having a birthday party with the whole clan showing up, all but one of the Harringtons we've seen onscreen just barely misses being there, and the one who does bite it was in all of one scene half a series ago.

While there's a definite sense of Anyone Can Die throughout the series, there is generally plot armor within a single book. If a character goes through significant plot development—especially if they're newly introduced—chances are they'll be among the few who survive the inevitable Honor Death Ride toward the end of the book.

Used as a major plot point in Redshirts, and the Plot Armor of the Intrepid's head officers is exploited by the main characters in order to travel to the real world and get the television show they're characters on cancelled before their characters are killed off.

Later on Andrew Dahl uses his own Plot Armor to deduce that he is the real main character of the book.

The Pirates Covered in Fur shows the main heroes going through grim situations that would (and did) kill off any regular, minor characters. Yet they manage to get through it all with only a couple scratches or bullet wounds. The last third of the story subverts this hard, and the main characters start dying fast.

This trope is one reason Gotrek, son of Gurni is either the best or worst member of the Slayer Cult, a penitent branch of dwarfen religion, sworn to atone for their sins by finding the biggest baddest enemies of dwarfdom and kill them (repeat until one of said enemies kill them). We don't know how long Gotrek was at this before he hooked up with Felix, but the two of them have been trying to get Gotrek killed for over 25 years in-universenote and in that time have literally killed several entire armies, not to mention several god-like beings, a dragon and an entire floating city of Dark Elves. Of course, Gotrek does carry an epic-level magic axe, which makes him significantly harder to kill.

Also applies to many of the other characters, particularly "Mad" Malakai Makaisson (a Slayer engineer, who has survived the explosion of at least two hydrogen-filled airships, plus a mountain exploding and collapsing on him, among other things) and Grey Seer Thanquol (a Chaotic Stupid rat-man wizard. He's actually the only major enemy Gotrek and Felix have had that's still alive. Mostly because it's funny).

Seen all the time in Discworld novels. Savvy characters sometimes just outright give up/run away because they recognize the plot armor the other guys have.

An obligatory example would be the end of the The Fifth Elephant - a potential "rival" for Captain Carrot's werewolf girlfriend dies dramatically while Carrot escapes with bad wounds. Vimes can't bring himself to say anything since Carrot's genuinely a good man, but he notes that things tend to work out for a King Incognito.

If you were dice, you'd always roll sixes. And the dice don't roll themselves. If it wasn't against everything he wanted to be true about the world, Vimes might just then have believed in destiny controlling people. And gods help the other people who were around when a big destiny was alive in the world, bending every poor bugger around itself...

A major plot element in The Last Hero. Cohen and his barbarian heroes have been exploiting it their whole lives, so when they realize they have the numbers on their side against an apparently ordinary man (Carrot again) and that therefore it would be him benefiting from it they instantly stand down.

Rincewind the "Wizzard", despite the fact that hes has no magical talent whatsoever, has managed to survive several perils on the disc, often saving it in the process, simply by following a philosophy of always running and acting like a coward. It doesn't hurt that the Lady (of luck) loves him; unfortunately, fate despises him.

In Deltora Quest the main trio of characters come ridiculously close to dying over and over again, but always manage to survive. Barda probably gets the worst of this, getting to "almost dead" at least twice before miraculously surviving.

Animorphs plays the trope entirely straight with the six POV characters - since morphing heals injuries, it's easy for them to avoid death. That is, until the final arc, when Rachel gets killed.

In Remnants, the author had no qualms at all about killing people, but she did promise before the series began that Jobs and Mo'Steel would survive.

The Hunger Games: In the film, anyone that gets more than a few seconds of screentime is guaranteed to have some, only for other characters to then penetrate it and kill them, usually rather sadistically. Only Katniss and Peeta's hold up long enough.

Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits averts this. The people watching make fun of an enemy who, falling off a building, continues to fire his gun into the window: but it transpires that even firing at random, he actually hit and killed Armando.

Hagrid in Harry Potter has Plot armour throughout the whole series, because as stated by Word of God, Rowling knew that Hagrid would carry at the end of the 7th book from the very beginning.

The100: In the S1 finale when it's decided the entire Ark would be sent down to the ground, but it was likely only one section of the station would survive.

24usually averts this but since Jack Bauer was the main character, it's no surprise that in Season 7, when he gets hit with a deadly virus, a cure is suddenly found. The writer's also said that Kim Bauer had this, because they felt Jack would never recover if she died.

A particularly blatant example is Spike's special resilience to the sunlight. No-name vampires are seen immediately disintegrating the moment they're pushed into the sunlight, but when Buffy takes off the Gem of Amarra from Spike's finger during their fight in the broad daylight and he remains without protection, he has just enough time to run into the shadow. Other times he can walk during daylight if he just wears a rug over his head (or in season 9 comics, a hat).

Though that has been canonically explained by descendants of the Master being much more resilient when it comes to sunlight... not that this resilience extends to the poor NPC vamps descended from him.

This also goes for the Scooby characters in earlier seasons such as Willow, Xander and Cordelia, who have no problem taking nighttime strolls through Sunnydale without Buffy, despite having no special powers or abilities to defend themselves with. With nightly sirings as common as they are portrayed, the group should have been vamped a long time ago.

At one point during Season Three, Faith strikes Willow across the mouth in genuine anger. Since Faith is a Slayer (and not inclined to pull punches even when she's in a good mood), only a solid layer of Plot Armor prevents Willow's jaw from shattering, and broken teeth flying about like so much popcorn.

At the end of the first half of a two-parter season finale, Kate Beckett's apartment exploded just as she stepped out of her shower. We all knew her Plot Armor would protect her, but we still had to wait a week to find out how. Turns out she survived by hiding in the bathtub.

They tried to avert the trope by playing that episode's guest star as a potential Suspiciously Similar Substitute (lines including "She's like the federal you!"). It was less than completely convincing, but a valiant effort.

Columbo: This applies to just about any TV detective, including Columbo, who often made himself very vulnerable to getting killed by the murderers he was investigating. Sometimes he even manipulated them into trying to kill him so that he could get the evidence he needed of their previous murder—needless to say, they never succeeded. Not least of all when he tricked a murderer into trying to cut his head off with a guillotine.

This show is notable for its extensive use of Plot Armor throughout its long run. The Doctor constantly faces super-powerful alien menaces with only his wit to save him, but he actually survives many of his close scrapes by fortuitous circumstances or getting taken captive instead of killed. Of course, his Bizarre Alien Biology has allowed him to regenerate from fatal encounters, but after nearly 800 episodes and over a thousand years worth of often insanely dangerous adventures he's only had to do this 12 times.

Played ludicrously straight in "The End of Time" when the Doctor jumps from a spaceship, falls approximately half a mile, crashes through a large skylight, lands hard on a marble floor, and sustains only minor injuries.

The Doctor's companions also have a fairly effective plot armor as well, especially in the original series, as they are usually standard humans facing the same dangers the Doctor does, and keep an extremely low mortality rate with only one or two of them biting the bullet. Companions in the new series have a comparatively weaker plot armor, but even then they tend to leave the Doctor because of some freak space-time accident rather than actual death.

Eureka: Sheriff Jack Carter is responsible for an entire company town of Mad Scientists, and due to his common-sense way of thinking, always saves the town from self-destructing from their own scientific curiosity. In fact, when an android deputy was commissioned to replace him, things went so spectacularly south during the test drive of the android's abilities that he concludes at the end of his report that with Sheriff Carter around, the town's odds of survival is much better.

The Following: Provides the closest one can get to an in-universe example: the the leading villain is simultaneously writing and enacting in-universe a novel starring the protagonist. As he wants the hero to live until the climax, he makes sure his plots and his minions hurt him but don't kill him off before that. This armor is solid - as far as said villain is in full control of events....

Famously avoids this trope by regularly killing off main characters in an almost offhand way, until Season 6 at least when suddenly Arya becomes impossible to kill, even when pro-assassin the waif stabs her in the gut, and don't even get us started on Jon Snow

Interestingly the cases where characters display plot armor are usually justified in the show. The waif fails to kill Arya because she usually kills with poison due to her physical frailty and Arya she tries to stab. Jon, by contrast, actually is killed, and resurrected by the woman who had earlier displayed similarly impossible magical abilities. It's also hinted at that he may actually be protected by the Lord of Light.

In the first season, Arzt tells the rest of the Losties that the centuries-old dynamite they've found is very fragile when holding a stick... which then explodes in his hand. But then rest of the Losties (Jack, Kate, Hurley) carry the dynamite without ever exploding, even though they do, in fact, run with it. Happens again in the sixth season, where Ilana, in the middle of a rant, roughly drops a bag of said dynamite. She dies rather anti-climatically.

Also, in the last season, Lapidus survives an exploding submarine, which is absolutely necessary for the plot because he's the only pilot. Parodied in "How Lost should have ended".

McMillan and Wife: In the second episode, during the final climax the villain barely looks at a police officer entering sideways through a sliding door, and instantly kills him. When McMillan walks through the same door a few minutes later, the man gets 2 shots off and misses both times.

Hannibal: The protagonist IS this trope. The sheer number of times Dr. Lecter has been able to avoid discovery and/or certain death through his opponents' convenient idiocy, ploys that rely on his ability to make people do what he wants without even trying (like a certain neurologist willing to lie to his patient about an inflammation of his brain) or sheer coincidence (caught in the act of murder? thank goodness the witness is face-blind!) would be enough for a series with ten times as many episodes and STILL look ridiculous.

Merlin. Not only has he managed to survive various attempts on his life, living as a magical person in an anti-magic kingdom, his lemming-like tendency to jump in front of Arthur and bartering his own life but most recently surviving something that was said to kill all other people that it touched, he was even getting better from it. Arthur counts as well, but a large amount of that is Merlin shielding him (and in turn being shielded by his Plot Armor). There's a Shrug of God on whether or not he's immortal, though, so it may or may not be justified.

Merlin also managed to go a whole day with a serious sword wound that, that slashed his chest and sliced his stomach while running away from the enemy and having to deal with Arthur's overattentive panicked mothering. Then he survived a giant rockfall avalanche. Then Morgana healed him and possessed him, making him hellbent on murdering Arthur. Yet somehow, most likely due to Arthur's plot armor, all of Merlin's fairly well-thought out attempts on his life flunk for the silliest reasons.

Sir Leon has this. The guy survived being bathed in flames by a dragon, being beaten to death long enough to be healed by the Cup of Life, and took a magic bolt to the chest that had just killed two knights and got up without so much as a scratch. Although this isn't Plot Armor so much as Ensemble Darkhorse Armor, and the fact that he's too popular to die.

Oddly, Arthur actually had plot armor in the legends. The only reason Mordred succeeded in killing him was that the mythic king wasn't carrying Excalibur - or more importantly, Excalibur's sheath, which made him invulnerable.

Red Dwarf: The Dwarfers both have and attempt to exploit this in the episode Cassandra, when the titular precognitive computer predicts that everyone in the main cast but Rimmer will survive the destruction of the shipwreck that they're on they form human plot armour for him by standing around him as they get to their escape ship. he manages to fall down a hole on the way but it turns out that the computer was lying all along

Lampshaded in Rome: Titus Pullo and Lucius Vorenus return to Caesar's camp and reveal that they encountered a fugitive Pompey on their way and let him go. Caesar furiously berates them and threatens to have them crucified, but then without an explanation dismisses them without punishment. Mark Antony, confused by this, asks why he let them go when by all accounts they should have been punished severely and made an example of. Caesar replies: "Any other man, certainly. But those two, they found my stolen standard, now they survive a wreck that drowned an army, and find Pompey Magnus on a beach. They have powerful gods on their side (the writers perhaps?), and I will not kill any man with friends of that sort."

The reason the characters never happened to slide right into sulfuric acid.

They did once wind up on a world that was completely engulfed in fire - but they were conveniently in the only clear spot we saw, just big enough for them, and were only stuck there for 10 seconds. (Mind you, simply not touching the flames would be no protection whatsoever from the heat of being surrounded by that much flame. However, since the fire on that world was alive, and a little of it followed them, perhaps it decided not to harm them.

One slide had them facing down some whacked-out tsunami coming to turn California into very tiny dirt clumps. Fortunately it was a short trip.

While their plot armor managed to save them from several of the most horrible scenarios, it had no qualms with leaving them at the status quo as well... in one episode, they slid into a world in which everyone - including them - had become filthy stinking rich. Naturally, they could only stay for a few minutes and didn't have time to capitalize on their newfound wealth.

It's actually a built-in part of the Applied Phlebotinum: it somehow scans the area around the target and will not open a portal into something instantly unsurvivable like underground or a mile in the air. It will find the one safe spot in someplace like the world of fire. However, the operative word is 'instantly.' You'd better run if that tsunami is a mile off but moving at a rate that will submerge you in minutes, or if the sulfuric acid comes in the form of rain that's on the way!

In the episodes "Camelot/Flesh and Blood", an Ori fleet destroys a combined force of more than 10 allied ships, and miraculously the main characters (divided among three of them, the fourth floating unprotected from debris and only kilometers away in space as it all occurs) all manage to survive due to various circumstances. Par for the course for this series, it's the Russian ship which goes down.

A variation of this trope appears in the fourth season episode "2010" in which the four regulars do actually die, but they are considerably more resistant to the effects of the automatic security weapons than an unnamed extra who dies almost instantly. While they do eventually succumb after dozens of hits, they naturally survive just long enough to accomplish their mission which is basically to push the Reset Button.

This happens multiple times. Alternate versions, cloned versions, or "our" versions in the presence of something that can save them lose their plot armor fast. Daniel Jackson is particular is noted for dying or otherwise taking critical damage over and over and over again. In a regular episode he's protected, but if a Goa'uld sarcophagus is around or a Reset Button is pushable, expect him to be staff-blasted, or buried under tons of rock, lose limbs, etc. etc. It's not easy being him.

Star Trek: In all the series, the weekly evil alien menaces have killed dozens of redshirts but only two major characters. And one of them kind of came back, albeit with a new body and personality. During space battles the ships that house major characters also have character shields, with many other ships being destroyed instead.

A common thing for the Chief Medical Officer of all the series to do whenever someone is injured or killed has a near suicidal tendency to walk right up to said person right that second and start administering treatment, even if whatever threat that hurt that person is still there, such as in the middle of a firefight. This trope seems to be the only adequate explanation these people don't end up dead.

The lethality of phaser weapons also seem to vary wildly depending on who they're being shot at. While there are multiple phaser settings that usually include disintegrate, against main characters they only seem to have three: stun, knock back, and mildly scorch.

Supernatural: All four main characters in the show, but especially Bobby. The general rule is that Bobby is invincible, Sam, Dean and Castiel can die fairly frequently but will always be resurrected, and nobody else makes it through more than a season or two at most.

Although Bobby did come back as a ghost, when he started losing it, Dean torched his last remaining link to earth, thus destroying his ghost as well. His soul was last seen ascending to heaven.

Torchwood: Gwen is another prime example. Despite the show touting an Anyone Can Die world, circumstances always seem to ensure Gwen's survival, even in highly implausible situations. This is mostly necessary to preserve her pairing with Jack as the lead characters on the show, since Jack is explicitly immortal and can thus be expected to survive pretty much anything that gets thrown at him. Being a mere mortal, Gwen instead survives by writer fiat. In one particularly notable instance of Bond Villain Stupidity, a group of government assassins sent to kill the Torchwood team is delayed in tracking down Gwen because they never bothered to research her home address!

Klaus, Rebekah and Elijah. During Season 4, it was announced that they would all go on to star in TVD's spin-off The Originals.

Kai from Season 6. Witch psychopath who's only power is to absorb other's magic and then use it? Why don't you vampires just drive a knive through his throat while he's powerless and be done with him? Oh yeah, because of Tyler's Romance Sidequest

This blog explicitly accuses the Vikings in... well... The Vikings of having this, even unto linking to this very page. The author also sees heaping helpings of What an Idiot, Idiot Ball, Idiot Plot, and Hollywood Tactics being served up as side dishes on both sides of the Viking/Saxon conflict in the show, all of it adding up to "Ragnar's the protagonist, so he wins, no matter how ridiculous it looks to any actual historian0."

Toku shows tend to have this as more of a plot weapon. It sure would be more fair if the monster had a special move that made the hero fall down and explode, wouldn't it?

The Walking Dead has this for anyone that is generally considered a "main character", like Rick, Carl, Daryl, or Glenn. While these characters are certainly placed in danger often enough, they are often kept alive by what amounts to pure luck. Possibly the most transparent example of this is at the beginning of Season 5, where Rick, Daryl, and Glenn are about to be slaughtered by a Cannibal Clan and are placed at the end of a line with nothing but Red Shirts in front of them. The butcher works his way through killing the extras, but is interrupted and stopped by another cannibal approaching him a split second before he can kill Glenn.

The above is only partially true; while it's true that the main characters are afforded a certain level of luck, the creators have stated that almost nobody is entirely safe. Not even Rick or Daryl. Season 7 taught us this the hard way by way of Negan killing Glenn, who was more or less Rick's most constant Number Two from the very first episode of the series. There is only one exception to the rule: Word of God has stated that the one character who they will not kill off for any reason is Carol.

Somewhat uniquely for a Police Procedural, The Wire never hesitates to give the police Plot Armor, maintaining dramatic tension even while making it clear that the police are hardly ever in real danger. Though the many residents of Baltimore' projects (drug dealers and bystanders alike) can drop dead at any moment, the show points out nobody in "The Game" would ever knowingly shoot a cop, since it's the easiest way to attract attention from "Five-Oh" who are otherwise content to ignore the projects. In the entire run of the show, in fact, only three police officers are shot in the line of duty, two of whom survive; the third is an undercover cop who's mistakenly killed by Prez.

Professional wrestling

Throughout its long history, wrestling has had a fetish of propping up old stars instead of actually pushing new ones.

As the past has shown, WWE (in particular RAW) won't push anybody higher than they absolutely have to. Look at Hogan. Stayed on top until he left. Everyone else was on the fringe until Hogan, Savage, Warrior and co. were all gone. Once the "main event" guys started defecting to WCW, then guys like Steve Austin found room at the top. After Austin, Rock and others left, Cena, Orton and Batista found their way up the card. Now, despite having the most talented and charismatic roster of all time possibly, nobody in WWE gets any kind of push-up except the veterans who can barely walk anymore, or people with family connections, like Roman Reigns (cousin of Rocky) or Charlotte (daughter of Ric Flair).

This can be invoked, subverted, played with, etc., by any Storyteller, depending on their style of play. Often, the won't even give stats to major NPCs (until the final battle or their major part in the story is done). While some may stat out their NPCs, many will still grant them plot armor. If for instance the PCs battle a major villain early in the story (and for instance the point is to have them get whipped badly) and the players manage to get close to beating them anyway (bad rolls for the NPC, inventive tactics from the PCs, etc), they may suddenly have a healing potion or minions may swoop in to save them. Same for major NPCs that are part of the players' party; a string of bad rolls may end up killing one of the ST's favorite NPCs (or ones they have major story plans for later), and the ST may just decide they're unconscious. However, many Storytellers will play the game mechanics straight, taking an unexpected death of a major NPC as a challenge to their storytelling skills.

The first edition of Dungeons & Dragons described Hit Points as a combination of toughness, luck and other factors. Fourth addition also introduced the reverse: 'minions' are adversaries that specifically exist to be taken out by the first hit to be scored against them and thus explicitly lack any plot armor whatsoever. A higher level character's hit points don't necessarily mean he or she can withstand more damage, it means they've become more adept at avoiding damage. Therefore, while an arrow inflicting 20 points of damage would kill a level one character, a level ten character has been around the block enough times that they're able to move, adjust their stance, or perform some other action that reduces the damage they suffered relative to what it would take to kill them.

A great many games have points you can spend on various things including not taking damage. Plot Points in Serenity, Chips in Deadlands etc. etc. The World of Darkness games generally don't have this but in Kindred of the EastDhampyr actually do have Plot Armor in the form of Passive Joss, which is a form of involuntary luck that sometimes stops them being hit by throwing freak events in the way.

The Games Workshop Lord of the Rings game gave major characters something like "Fate points" — allowing them to shrug off wounds just because they're major characters. The number of fate points a character gets is determined by how good their final fate in the films and books is — for instance, Aragorn, Sam, Gandalf the White etc. have high fate point counts, whereas Boromir, Denethor, Grí­ma Wormtongue etc have low counts.

In GURPS there's an option to play a "cinematic campaign", which basically allows the DM to run the show based on Rule of Cool. Characters start out with twice the normal point allowance (and they're considerably more badass than ordinary people to begin with), they get special bonuses in combat, and they can save an unspent character point or two to shake off a bad injury as "just a flesh wound."

Shadowrun has a "karma pool" for each character. You can "burn" one or more dice to give yourself a bonus to some challenging roll at a moment of dire need. The karma is gone once used, but survive long enough and you'll get more.

Shadowrun also has a related rule called Dead Man's Trigger. The character will still die, but by using up their entire Karma pool, they can enact one last action before expiring. This can result in the last hero standing shooting the Big Bad dead just before succumbing to all the wounds taken during the final climactic battle, making it literal plot armor... it protects the plot, even if it doesn't manage to protect the character.

Invulnerable saves in Warhammer 40,000 and Ward saves in Warhammer are usually justified as superior agility, supernatural toughness, magical wards, or force fields, but for some people they are explained as luck or fate.

Plenty of special characters have the Eternal Warrior rule that grants them immunity to instant death attacks. It's supposedly to represent their superhuman toughness, but let's face it, the game developers don't want to see the likes of Marneus Calgar, Chapter Master of the Ultramarines or Abaddon the Despoiler, Warmaster of Chaos get one-shotted by a lascannon on the first turn (bonus points for being from Games Workshop's Creator's Pet faction). It might be worth noting that Abaddon has gotten killed in White Dwarf Battle Reports (in one case he was cut to ribbons by the Sanguinor).

The playable factions get this to a degree but the worst offenders are TheImperium of Man; especially a certain all-male, Power-armour wearing, Super Soldierfaction. For example, during the campaign for Cadia, Abaddon won but they retconned the campaign as not canon, because then Chaos would win and the Imperium, apparently the protagonists of 40K, would fall.

In the Lord of the Rings: Strategy Battle Game variant, characters had "Fate" points, which they could use to avoid damage or other harm. These were quite explicitly plot armor; they reflected in the game the fates of the characters in the novels and on the screen - for instance, Boromir, who dies in the novels and films, has a lower Fate count than Aragorn, who does not.

The RPG spinoffs Dark Heresy and associated games have it as a rule. Characters have a small number of Fate points that are good for rerolls and other bonuses each session, but they can be permanently lost to allow for a character that would otherwise die to miraculously survive the encounter.

The newer Star Wars d20 has "Force points" which can be spent on temporary bonuses.

The older Revised Edition d20 Star Wars RPG had vitality points to represent hits as tiring near-misses, and critical hits could very well kill you since they bypassed them.

Eclipse Phase has "Moxie," which can be used to "flip" a roll - since all rolls in Eclipse Phase are done on percent die (d100) flipping a roll can turn a 91 (a very bad failure, usually) into an 19 (a nearly guaranteed success). Criticals (11, 22, etc.) are notable for not being flippable - a Critical Failure (99) is irredeemable.

Hong Kong Action Theatre bases its difficulties to hit characters directly on their importance to the plot of the "movie." Player characters are assumed to be of major importance, and are generally much tougher and more skilled than minor importance mooks, who go down like tenpins when faced with the former and often need a natural 20 to even hit them at all. The top tier of importance is Extreme which is mainly reserved for the Big Bad. Major and Extreme importance characters can make Toughness rolls to resist getting One Hit Killed if their opponent scores a natural 20, dodge grenade explosions that would kill lesser characters, and even survive getting blown up provided that they can take the damage.

Similar to (and preceding) Fourth Edition D&D, Mutants & Masterminds has a "minion" rule that designates certain enemies as lacking plot armor - one good hit floors them. The "default to nonlethal" rule also acts as a form of plot armor; however, on the same page is the rules for lethal damage, for when the gloves come off.

West End Games' old Star Wars d6 RPG had this trope codified in the rules. No matter what else happened, you would rarely die. They called it "Script Immunity" and a number of people still identify this trope by that name.

Paranoia features characters who simply are invulnerable because the GM declares that they are. This protection is absolutely inviolable and only bestowed by the GM's grace. The GM is encouraged to make you rue the day you were cloned should you attack such characters. Knowing that this is the case is treasonous, and whining about it is doubly so. Now, taking advantage of it without admitting you know about it is decidedly in the spirit of the game. Nothing can save you if the GM gives it to you; you're being set up for a legendary fall. Now that you know this, please report to Room101 for a fun, happy, bouncy execution.

Several games that rely on a Metaplot make sure that their important characters, when they show up in a published adventure, are impossible for the PCs to kill. Sometimes they simply don't have stats at all to avert the tabletop version of the Lord British Postulate ("if you stat it, they will kill it"), while other times, the GM is simply instructed to railroad the plot so that they survive whatever the PCs do.

Examples of the former include Antediluvians and Caine from Vampire: The Masquerade, Harlequin from Shadowrun, and Stone from the first edition of Deadlands. In later editions, Stone gets stats, but he gets a special ability that leaves him effectively invulnerable anyway. Likewise, Harlequin was given stats in the recent Street Legends sourcebook, although the sheer amount of defensive abilities he has makes him effectively invincible anyway.

One of the most infamous examples of the latter is Samuel Haight from the Old World of Darkness; Storytellers are explicitly told to ensure that he gets away with whatever he does. Ultimately, however, even White Wolf got sick of him, and he ended up dead and turned into an ashtray in the Shadowlands.

The Ur-Example of the latter may be the original Dragonlance D&D modules NPCs were all fully statted, but the GM was instructed to arrange a last-minute escape and/or a Never Found the Body situation whenever necessary to preserve someone for future plot. The writers called it "obscure death."

The Dresden Files has something like this in the form of consequences and concessions.

Consequences are a series of wounds that a character can take to avoid being Taken Out and keep fighting. While PCs and named NPCs generally are allowed the choice to use them or not, GMs are advised not to give any consequences to mooks. As a result, a successful gunshot that will kill a Mook might cause a PC to weather it with only a twisted ankle from ducking out of the way.

Concessions are a way to be Taken Out on your own terms. In normal gameplay, whoever strikes the final blow that takes someone out decides what happens—whether the target lives or dies, for a start. But taking a concession means you decide how you're Taken Out, at the cost of some still-tangible loss. So while a vampire taking out a PC may well result in the vampire killing that PC to retrieve a MacGuffin, a PC conceding to a vampire may mean the PC is merely knocked out while the vampire grabs the MacGuffin and makes good an escape. This process is, again, typically not offered to nameless mooks.

The Fate System in general (which is what Dresden Files uses) assigns plot armor in a pretty straightforward fashion. Major plot-relevant characters (including all player characters, of course) get standard-length stress tracks and a full set of consequence slots, while the less important the character is, the less stress and the fewer consequences they can take before being Taken Out — to the extreme of the lowest-ranking "nameless NPCs " in some versions such as Fate Core not getting even a single stress box to their name and simply being taken out of any conflict right on the first successful hit. These guys make, for example, excellent anonymous innocent bystanders for villains and monsters to threaten.

In Spycraft, a critical hit will kill any "minion"-class enemy in one shot, but will only knock an enemy Agent or major villain unconscious.

The Exalted setting features a rare case where this trope is invoked in-universe. The Time of Cascading Years is what happened when due to a botched spell, time itself got broken and the various people started living in separate timelines. Some powerful Exalted and their retainers finally managed to fix the situation... but only for themselves. In other words, the only person who got through the Cascading Years are people who remember actively taking part to the effort to repair time (one way or another). The bystanders just ceased to exist.

Everyone in Rocket Age has a bit of plot armour in the form of Story Points. The real question is how much? If the character is a Red Shirt, they might have a quarter of the points a hero or major character has. Player characters have the added advantage of manipulating the plot, meaning they can get out of situations no NPC would have a chance of escaping.

Toys

Destiny acts this way in BIONICLE. It is impossible for any character to die unless they have completed their destiny, unless their destiny actually involves dying. Although, many characters appear to retain this immunity even after completing their destiny by virtue of being very popular with the fans...

Video Games

Any video game with a save or continue system. Enemy dies, plot moves on. Player dies, plot resets until the enemy dies. No matter how many times you should've died, canonically you always live through everything. In the case of both Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, this is explained. In the former, the player has his/her soul bound to a place called nexus and as such, is transported there at every death. In the latter, the player is an undead, which in the game's mythos means "being unable to stay dead, even defying time if needed be, for as long as it has a goal".

In Brothers in Arms, any squad members who die in missions will magically come back to life at the end of the level. They can only permanently die in scripted storyline events.

Undertale not only plays with the trope, but directly calls you out on it. Several characters know that while the playable Kid Herocan die, the kid's determination allows them to go back in time and reset the timeline over and over until they overcome the obstacle they face, which is similar to how a player keeps reloading their save file whenever they lose so that they can keep trying until they win. The main antagonist also has the ability to load and save during their Final Boss fight, allowing them to screw you over indefinitely until a third party steps in to prevent the antagonist from reloading their save file.

While Anyone Can Die in Until Dawn, some characters can't die until certain parts of the story. Sam and Mike, most notably, have their respective Plot Armor last the longest, as the only time they can die is the final cutscene.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time lampshades this with the Prince telling the story of his adventures. When you die in-game, he comments that it didn't happen that way and that he should start again. Though how you relate a story to someone and mistakenly add a bit in where you died is beyond me.

Bad Guys never seem to go quietly, so Robo's last shot reduces the Toad's sporty spacecruiser to a flaming jalopy!Trying hard, but failing miserably to maintain their cool, unflappable image, the Toads crash their bullet ridden banger onto an empty planet!As the Toads are the heroes in this game, they escape the mangled wreck completely unscathed!Using the teleporters, that they just happened to have with them, they travel back to base!

Golden Sun has a Tournament Arc which that the main characters have to win of course. So what happens if you enter the tournament and lose? You wake up in the inn having a nightmare about entering the tournament and losing. Then you go off to enter the tournament again. You keep having this Dream Within a Dream"Groundhog Day" Loop until you finally win. This way the player still has to win the tournament, and there's no bending of the rules to let you reenter when you should be eliminated so in-universe the Tournament retains its integrity.

Reimu Hakurei is this. She is the Barrier Maiden and Gensokyo would just vanish if she dies. This is why more powerful beings such as Yukari, Yuuka, Suika, Remilia go along with the spellcard rules, so they can resolve their differences without accidentally destroying the world. This becomes subverted in Perfect Cherry Blossom, in which the main characters have to breach the barrier that divides the real world from the netherworld in order to take Gensokyo's spring back. Yuyuko states this before fighting Reimu saying that being at that point of the netherworld basically means she's probably dead. Even if Reimu loses against the non-lethal spellcard rules, all the spring in Gensokyo will resurrect the Saigyou Ayakashi and Fridge Horror will remind you his abilities.

For being a fairy, Cirno possesses an uncanny ability to remain intact in situations that would be rather dangerous for a human, let alone a fairy whose stated life expectancy is usually measured in months. Though not that it matters, as fairies don't permanently die anyway.

In FreeSpace and FreeSpace 2, mission designers have this tool at their disposal. Ships can be set to not take damage past a certain point, which is usually set to a number that isn't suspicious at first glance.

Played for laughs in Just Another Day, where Alpha 1 is unkillable due to being the player character. Reality very blatantly warps around him to make sure he always has a way out of whatever ridiculously unfair situation he finds himself in.

Also, in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Metal Gear Ray was originally designed specifically as a counter to the now widely proliferated Metal Gear Rex. However, in part 4 Solid Snake manages to hold his own against the prototype Ray in the reactivated husk of the destroyed Rex (left to rust for a decade).

Subverted in Call of Duty 4. During one of your missions as Jackson, your chopper is downed by a nuclear shockwave, and you wake up soon after in the wreckage. Instead of the expected harrowing escape through the wasteland, you end up only being able to stagger around in Ground Zero for a minute before dying. As well, when finally facing the game's Big Bad, at least half, if not all, of the game's main characters are shot to death. The Call of DutyWiki has its own page for the phenomenon, covering the entire series; note that there are some characters who have full-on plot armor for all their appearances, and others who only have it until their role in the plot is fulfilled.

Many a fan groaned at in Fate/stay night at the conclusion of the Fate route, where Shirou´s Healing Factor is revealed literally minutes before the Final Battle to be a Noble Phantasm capable of blocking Ea, Gilgamesh´s Wave Motion Sword capable of destroying the entire world in a single blast. It was then used to block that and a swarm of curses from the Grail, completely killing any conflict once Shirou and Saber finally used it.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, perhaps to avoid completely breaking quests as one could do in its predecessor Morrowind, had certain characters marked Essential - they cannot die, only fall unconscious, after which they would get up like nothing ever happened. However, this can still end up Unwinnable if they're trapped somewhere where they continuously take damage, like a lava pit.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has characters that are essential for quests which crawl around for a bit when drained of health, then get back up. However, there are so many quests in the game that approximately 70% of a city's population is essential, which really gets in the way if the player were to go on a rampage.

As for The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, plot-critical NPCs were capable of dying just as everyone else was, and since the game had no "dynamic targeting reticule" that turned into a crown whenever it was pointing to someone particularly important, the player had to make sure he or she understood who was important. Hopefully no one came across a character he or she was not meant to at the time, before knowing if or why this character was important. However, if a character important to the main plot was killed (it actually uses the same Essential flag as in Oblivion, they just changed the effect of it and added scripting to add or remove it in-game for the later game), the game was decent enough to inform you that the "thread of prophecy has been severed" and suggest that you might want to re-load. The tricky thing is that which characters give the warning and which don't are a bit hit-and-miss (some plot-important characters don't give the warning, and some random plot-unimportant hostiles in tombs do).

Fallout 3. Children, though not (usually) plot-important NPCs, cannot be harmed at all, though they, let alone all adults near them, will notice if you attack them and will, if armed, respond in kind. Fallout 4 refines this a bit: an NPC flagged "essential" will take a knee when it reaches zero hitpoints instead of dying. Any NPC involved in a current quest, available as a companion, or involved in the main plot tends to have this flag, meaning almost every named NPC in the game that's not specifically an enemy is immortal and invincible. This causes the Diamond City Blues quest to be significantly more shocking than intended, since a named allied NPC that runs a store (storekeepers are also mostly flagged) can die during a combat sequence with no buildup or fanfare.

Mostly subverted in Fallout: New Vegas, where every adult NPC can be killed, though certain plot-important NPCs only appear in certain. Played straight with Yes Man and Victor, with the justification that as AI, they can simply jump between different Securitron units.

In the Fire Emblem series, Final Death is normally a feature. However, certain characters are critical-enough to the plot that they'll merely suffer a Career-Ending Injury when reduced to 0 HP, rather than be killed. Gameplay-wise, the effect is the same, but it allows them to still appear in cutscenes where needed. The actual main characters give a Game Over if they die.

Deirdre and Julia from Fire Emblem Jugdral have a unique case of this. If either of them reaches 0 HP, they'll be captured by the enemy, and rescued at the end of the chapter. This is because the Big Badneeds them alive, since they carry the bloodline of the God of Evil he's trying to revive.

If a plot-critical NPC is "killed" during gameplay, outside of Plotline Death, they will later come Back from the Dead and call you to pick them up from the hospital.

Also, in a rare aversion of this trope, all your characters "deaths" (referred to as being "wasted" in-game, as you are merely considered wounded and start the next scene at a hospital, even if you had your head chopped off) and arrests are canon for the rest of the game (unless you reset to the last save point obviously) and are counted up on your stats screen. It should be noted though that it doesn't effect the gameplay at all.

Grand Theft Auto V has plot armor return for the player characters and their friends/family. Killing an NPC related to the player character or even killing another player character will just have them respawn later on and you footing the bill for their hospital fees. The plot armor is removed for Trevor and Michael, two of the three playable characters, if you choose to go for the endings where one of them has to die and thus they will be Killed Off for Real.

Warcraft III hero units took less damage from most forms of attack. Even though they could be slain non-plot, they could be revived at special Altars. Certain characters had "Divine" armor that reduced all non-Chaos attacks to one point of damage.

In Resident Evil, the main characters are always protected against the various zombifying viruses and outbreaks, at least partially due to gameplay mechanics. Taken to the extreme in Leon's fight against the first Lepotitsa in Resident Evil 6; the creature releases the C-Virus in gas form that instantly zombifies anyone who breathes it in... but Leon and Helena only lose some health from it.

In Wing Commander and Wing Commander II (and associated add-ons), the home bases for the character are able to take damage far exceeding the defensive stats in the manual. In the WC2 add-ons, the Bonnie Heather is pretty much unkillable by anything. Attempting to destroy it using the "Finger of God" option in Debug Mode crashes the game.

It's pretty much a given in the Time Crisis series that Wild Dog will be in every game, even if he suffers grave wounds every time.

Wild Dog takes it a bit beyond "grave wounds." He blows himself up in every game, yet inexplicably returns in the next.

Lampshaded by Balthier, the self-proclaimed "Leading Man" in Final Fantasy XII. While performing a heroic sacrifice during the game's climax, he assures his companion Fran that the main character "never dies". She seems to doubt his Plot Armor however, as she admits that he's "more of a supporting role". He lives!.

Heavy Rain: Ethan can get into a car accident, cut up his body crawling through broken glass, electrocute himself, cut off his own finger, get shot at with a shotgun at point-blank range (it clips him, though) and fall off a building in that order, and he still can't die until the endgame. Shelby can get beat down, get shot in the shoulder, get beat down again, get beat down once more, nearly drown in his car and get shot at by Mooksin that order, and he still can't die until the endgame. Justified in Shelby's case, as he's the main villain.

In an example of literal Plot Armor, Perfect Dark tends to give the Big Bads unbreakable energy shields during in-game missions. They generally run off before you can try to shoot them down anyway, leaving you with several armed Mooks, but chasing them down and pumping them full of lead proves they're invincible until their respective death cutscenes. This doesn't apply to your allies, of course.

In the endgame of Mass Effect 2, where all characters have the chance to be Killed Off for Real, Miranda Lawson can survive situations that would kill other characters for half of the mission or so. Afterwards, she can die like anyone else.

Par for the course in Resident Evil: the T-Virus that the heroes try to fight against is spread via biting (or through the environment, like water), and you can have your player bitten (or wade through T-Virus infested water in the case of the first game) and suffer no ill side effects. The only exception is the first game's Yawn, who poisons the player normally instead. Also, Jill gets infected in the third game, but another survivor, Carlos is able to make a vaccine for her.

Finally justified with Resident Evil 6 and the C-Virus, which spreads only by gas, not by skin-to-skin contact.

Final Fantasy IX has particularly bad examples of this where the main characters lie prostrate at the feet of the villains only to not be killed. And this happens no less than three times.

At least one of these is justified. Especially at the end of Disk I, because the person looking at the party is none other than the Smug Snake Kuja.

In Kingdom Hearts II, while Riku can take damage during the final battle, he will not fall unconscious even at 0 HP. The only time he can lose is when Sora is captured by Xemnas and Riku must rescue him under player control. If he has 0 HP when this happens, he may simply not take any damage. The same applies to the data rematch in Final Mix.

The trope applies to all party members in the series. While the playable character's defeat is a game over, party members simply fall unconscious, only to get up after a moment with some HP. The only exceptions are the above, where the party member cannot be defeated, and the fight with Captain Barbossa in the second game. If Jack is defeated, the game is over.

Baten Kaitos makes this a part of the plot. A character who bonds with a Guardian Spirit (read:player) is said to be granted incredible strength. Kalas, the main character of the first game, knows this... and used it to cover his ass as he set up his betrayal of the entire party. AND YOU.

Squad 7 in Valkyria Chronicles. For the most part it's unobtrusive, since it's a war game and it's entirely possible to lose during the individual stages, but it's impossible to lose any of your lieutenants permanently (without getting a Game Over, anyway). There's also the fact that Selvaria, upon being captured, requests that Squad 7 be let go to escort her men away from the battle field before she flash-fries the rest of the army in her Suicide Attack. Squad 7 is the only reason she was captured in the first place and represents the only serious threat to the Empire; if she didn't have to let them walk because of the plot, the Empire would've won.

A frequent fan criticism in World of Warcraft, where important characters and factions are usually kept around despite the constant warfare and ubiquitous overwhelming odds which should have by rights wiped them out years ago. Particularly frustrating when you see a main character do something despicable (this is war, after all) and just know they're never going to be meaningfully punished.

Notably, the majority of politically important player groups probably should no longer exist. The Blood Elves, Gnomes, Draenei, Worgen, and Goblins are all the "last survivors" of various devastating wars and disasters, but can all still muster sufficient troops at any given time. The Darkspear are supposedly a small tribe with at most a few thousand members, but their numbers and military prowess never seems to dwindle.

Non-player groups benefit from this as well. The Scarlet Crusade couldn't have been a very big movement to begin with, but despite years of being kicked around by neverending Scourge, Alliance, and Horde attacks, they remain active and prominent simply because the Forsaken need enemies to fight who are objectively more evil than they are. There logically couldn't be more than a few hundred High Elves or survivors of Lorderon around, but those groups can always muster sufficient military forces when the story calls for them. (This is particularly ironic in the case of Lorderon, given that their forces are almost always further devastated by whatever they're called on to fight.)

A particularly pronounced example was the Siege of Orgrimmar. At face value this would be a devastating setback for the Horde and a decisive, even potentially conflict-ending win for the Alliance. But of course, the game must maintain its balance of relative power, so you quickly realize that very little real damage can or will be done to the Horde. In fact, the necessity of letting Horde players themselves paradoxically lay siege to their own capital resulted in a storyline that gave more immediate political and military benefits of the battle to the Horde themselves.

The comic "Anduin: Son of the Wolf" ends with a Flash Forward to a conversation between Velen and Anduin, the latter of whom is now an old man. Given that Anduin is only 17 in Legion, this means both of these characters must survive for at least the next 50 or so in-universe years -probably well beyond the lifespan of WoW, unless there's a Time Skip or something. It's especially bad because the comic came out right around the time Velen announced his seemingly suicidal plan to retake Argus from the Burning Legion.

Plot-critical friendly ships in the X-Universe games are typically indestructible: they'll go down to 93% hull and then stop. The jumpgates are also indestructible unless otherwise specified by the plot (as in the Kha'ak invasion of President's End in X2: The Threat).

Levant in Jade Cocoon has literal, in-universe plot armor in the form of a ring he wears. When he loses all his health the ring warps him back to the entrance with 1HP, essentially making it impossible for him to die. If you lose to a boss and challenge them again, they even mock you for having to use it, and taunt that you'll never be able to beat them.

In any Star Wars videogames where the player is fighting in the Battle of Yavin, Darth Vader's T.I.E Fighter is indestructible, no matter how many times you hit it. Hitting Vader's T.I.E fighter enough times will result in you being able to evade it. This was the case in both the original 1983 arcade game and the 1998 Star Wars Trilogy arcade game.

Many hostile aces in Starlancer try to jump away once damaged enough. Some of these can be killed as an optional objective, provided can kill them in the few seconds it takes to power up their drives. This can usually only be accomplished by immediately spamming dumbfire rockets when they power up. Other aces are part of the plot in later missions and become flat out invulnerable during those few seconds. You won't know which case applies until after you've wasted half your missile loadout.

Destroy All Humans! subverts Plot Armor as death results in a new clone of Crypto the alien being created. Yet, it does not explain the lack of effect the original dead alien has on authorities.

Borderlands2 has a mission called "Shoot this guy in the face", where you have to shoot the guy in the face. This trope kicks in if you attempt to shoot him anywhere else; attack him anywhere but his face (or hit him in the face with a melee attack) and it won't do anything to him.

The Warrior of Light/the player character in Final Fantasy XIV has plot armor to an absurd degree. They're immune to being brainwashed by primals, they shake off an attack from Midgardsormr, an ancient dragon that has the capability to level entire cities, and can basically survive any attack thrown their way while anyone else that is not the main characters are cannon fodder. This is handwaved by explaining that the Warrior of Light is protected with Hydaelyn's blessing, which allows them to survive a lot of things. Despite the fact that the blessing is removed when the Heavensward secnario begins, the Warrior of Light still has plot armor.

In Wings Of Glory, the named members of your squadron who participate in the main plot cannot be shot down in missions.

In Bob and George the characters frequently note they won't die because they are title characters or otherwise plot important. This sometimes takes the form of literal Plot Armor, as in the plastic-wrap force-field the title characters were given by their mother. They both lose their plastic-wrap force-field, but still retain their plot armor. At one point when Bob is presumed killed, the title and banner of the webcomic changed to simply being 'George,' until it was revealed he actually survived.

Schlock Mercenary has plot armour in a kind of roundabout way, only a handful of characters are ever permanently killed, most just end up with their heads temporarily in jars (Tagon is killed in one story arc, but then Kevyn warps back from the future and changes history so that he doesn't, oh, and Petey suicides earlier in the piece, but he appears later having backed himself up into a mini-tank).

An honourable mention should go to ensign Red Shirt (yes, that's his name) from Legostar Galactica, who has some kind of Plot-anti-armor. Laser beams will curve around other crewmembers just to hit him, whether the enemy was actually aiming in his general direction or not. Although the medic always manages to fix him up afterwards, so perhaps he has some sort of straight Plot Armor, just not a very nice one.

The Order of the Stick lampshades this in the last panel of this strip. Miko is shown to hold her own against the Order with Durkon doing nothing, and is very strongly implied to only have this ability in bad weather, which acts against V's magic and Haley's shooting. But in the linked strip, she beats and captures the entire Order between panels, not even merely routing them.

And Elan the Bard, who asked the Oracle, "Does this story have a happy ending?" and received the answer, "Yes, for you, at least." Elan can die only in a means which makes the Oracle's prophecy true.

Speaking of the Oracle, the Oracle is brought back from the dead each time he is killed because he knows when he will be killed and makes arrangements. In this setting, death can be a slap on the wrist sometimes.

Shelley Winters of Scary Go Round is indestructible. She survives several catastrophes that should have killed her, and even a few that did, but she came Back from the Dead. It's even discussed in the comic. In fact, not even the end of Scary Go Round (with her leaving town) can stop her, as she still appears around her author's website.

Homestuck gets hit with this pretty hard; while the series doesn't shy away from the main characters dying, there's usually a loophole to get them out of it. Dream selves, time hopping doubles, and alternate timeline duplicates are all fair game though. In fact this is so prevalent that when Bro and Davesprite seemed to be Killed Off for Real, the predominant fan reaction was Like You Would Really Do It. Turns out only one was actually killed.

Andrew Hussie is also prone to giving characters temporary plot armor by way of the series's weird time mechanics and flash-forwards.

Gamzee Makara has literal plot armor given to him, supposedly having something to do with his being a clown (as stated by the author avatar). He is absolutely incapable of dying, taking more than a hundred bullets to the chest and regenerating his torn body. This is lampshaded in the following conversation:

DAVE:so youre just gonna let him suffocate in there thenVRISKA:Dave, give me a little more credit than that.VRISKA:Gamzee is supposedly relevant to some stuff that's going to happen in the new universe.VRISKA: He's still got some "plot armor" or some shit. VRISKA:So when Earth is resitu8ted, I'm just going to drop the fridge in the fucking ocean or something, and let him find his own way out.DAVE:ok thats fair

A general rule is this: If a character is a human SBURB player, Karkat, or one of Karkat's friends, they're safe and any death will turn out to be a fake. Anyone else dying is fair game, including any carapacian including AR and the agents and some of the more minor trolls. Vriska did stay dead for an extremely large portion of the comic but was eventually revived by means of her death being ret-conned away.

Ascending to the God Tiers gives characters near-impenetrable in-story Plot Armor. They can only be killed in a manner that is either heroic or just, preventing meaningless deaths. Interestingly, the heroicness or justness of the deaths are decided by a clock, it is not clear if a single clock or one per character, but the important thing is that the clock simply exists within the universe of the story, meaning characters could conceivably go and mess with it to kill or save a particular God Tier. This is one interpretation of what happens to Vriska, as a Take That to the fans arguing back and forth on her villianousness or lack thereof. Aranea shows that her luck-based powers work on the clock, which aided in killing off some God Tiered characters, but the events of which were ret-conned later. Even the characters she killed ended up surviving to the end thanks to an alternate timeline.

The Cyantian Chronicles is a collection of comic series , the first one "Campus Safari" taking place ten years after the current series, "Darius". Any characters that appear in "Safari" (i.e. Syrys, Darius, Sheanna, Ravon, Cilke, Chatin, Silver, Tira, Darrik, Rama and a significant number of others) are certain to survive at least until the latest chronological strips, but it looks like you shouldn't get too attached to anyone else.

Played straight in The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, both for what situations major characters can get out of and what kind of damage they can recover from. The Alt Text acknowledges this from time to time. Perhaps the most memorable: the Doctor is running through a temple full of death traps and ends up in a room where he is completely surrounded point-blank by traps and robot guards. The alt text snarks "clearly he dies on the next page".

Chuck "SF Debris" Sonnenburg frequently riffs on how implausibly good character shields are on Star Trek, with people shot point-blank center-of-mass and yet are fine.

Chuck: Guns don't kill people! Technobabble does!

In "Year of Hell," Tuvok is only a few feet away from an exploding torpedo, and yet his permanent injury is blindness.

Chuck: Imagine if the torpedo had actually collided with him. It just might have killed him!

When several characters are killed off or seriously injured in rapid succession in the Season 4 finale of Andromeda, Chuck points out that things are bad because the character shields are down.

In the climax of "These Are The Voyages...", Trip rigs an explosion powerful enough to rip through walls, and only his lungs are damaged. "If he held his breath, he'd probably be fine!"

In A Dumb Way to Die, after Groot (Maokai) managed to survive the enemy’s 4 man focus, The Odd One joked that his plot armor was too strong for him to die. Subverted the next moment when Maokai dived under the turret and die just so he can kill the enemy Sona.

Averted in several shorts of How It Should Have Ended, as its episodes tend to show why several characters from different movies survive is because of plot and shows what happens in reality. It goes to show in the 2012 episode showing that the reason why the main characters ever survived the massive disaster is because of the plot and shows that they would be just like anyone else in the movie in reality if the movie ever happened in real life.

Fry's death has been subverted kind of often. In one of the first episodes it was implied that he was mere days from death.

Bender: Ooh! Dibs on his CD player!

Every one of the several times Fry has "died," or done something that was supposed to result in his death, it turned out he either wasn't really dead, it didn't happen, etc. Though, he did die just like nearly everyone else as part of the premise of the "Rebirth" episode.

The DCAU wasn't immune to this as well, with various criminals clearly having an easy target at Batman or another hero. Of course, they always miss their target. The rare example being Darkseid, who was able to casually vaporize a fairly important character with disregard. People didn't even realize he was actually dead until the funeral scene kicked in.

Of course, Darkseid does have 'chase you down' death-beam eyeballs.

Naturally, Batman and Superman both have Plot Armor to avoid or just plain tank it anyway. Its even more silly in the actual comic storyline, where they LITERALLY are protected by The Source, one of the aspects of The Presence/DC God, and therefore are practically immune to his Omega Beams.

grudge-match.com once had a match between the two reality-benders, Bugs and Neo. Bugs won.

The same goes for Wile E. Coyote, who by all rights should be dead mere minutes into his episodes. Every scheme he attempts to catch his prey either results in him blowing up, falling off a cliff, or generally getting badly hurt, yet he's fine and hunting all over again immediately after.

Lampshaded in Spawn, where Twitch takes a bullet to the brainpan and the only result is (relatively realistically-portrayed) Easy Amnesia, baffling the doctors and Police Chief Banks, who shot him in the first place.

Though more violent and mature than many comic book cartoons, Young Justice isn't immune to this either. There's an Anyone Can Die-style atmosphere in the second season, but of the characters killed in the Time Skip (Aquagirl, Jason Todd, Marie Logan and Ted Kord), only Aquagirl and Marie had any real role in the plot. All of the major characters were safe. At least until the finale, when Kid Flash pulled a Heroic Sacrifice (and one that anyone with even a passing knowledge of Flash comics knows was never intended to be permanent at that).

More generally, that the team was able to operate at all when the Light had the resources and power to wipe them out in two seconds flat at basically any point. Ditto with the Justice League actually, though they were kept alive because the Light wanted to frame them. For some reason.

Roger the Alien Among Us from American Dad!! is practically made of plot armor. Although he may take an occasional beating, death can't touch him. Not only does he always survive certain doom, he's almost always saved by the most amazing and unlikely of circumstances, usually at the last possible second. His own people tried to rid themselves of him by deliberately crashing his space ship into the desert outside Roswell, New Mexico but no dice.

Stan also undergoes all sorts of horrific injuries and scenarios, including, on separate occasions, being paralysed by gun shot (and rehabilitated by another), having his retinas detached, undergoing numerous bloody beatdowns, losing his legs to a polar bear attack and briefly being pronounced dead on at least two occasions. Regardless of this however, he always recovers and reverts to the Status Quo by the end of each episode.

Their foes, Rufus and Amberley, are even more exaggeratively safeguarded, generally defeating their foes with barely any effort and usually being totally immune to even slapstick pain. Even cases the Urpneys offer a genuine threat and have them on the ropes, a Deus ex Machina will quickly dumb it back down so the Noops still have victory just a couple easy steps within their grasp. Only a handful of episodes force the Noops to deal with a challenge based on their own competence, and even then it's difficult to say they don't have the story on their side.

In The Simpsons, Homer Simpson is a grossly incompetent safety inspector who has cheated death so many times that the writers have lost count. Bart Simpson has also had a vast number of attempts on his life from several different villains, all failing for various contrived reasons. The obligatory plot armor of the Simpson family is even lampshaded in one of the Halloween episodes, where most of the kids at the school have been killed and eaten and Bart and Lisa are in mortal danger. Since the specials are non canon however...

Bart: Uhh, nevertheless, I remain confident that something will come along and save the two Simpson children. note It didn't.

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